Bernard Herrmann

September 19 - 26, 1 9 9 6 [Music Reviews]

Uneasy listening

Bernard Herrmann's music makes its own movies
by Richard C. Walls
Although many a film scorer has had a distinct style, only a few have had a distinct voice -- that singular expressiveness that permeates every endeavor. And of these few, the most distinct voice of all belonged to Bernard Herrmann (1911-'75). During a movie career that started with Citizen Kane ('41) and ended with Taxi Driver ('76), and that encompassed a variety of genres and imaginative orchestrations, the composer's essential quality consistently shone through -- an elegant moroseness seemingly suspended between some half-remembered tragedy and the certainty that things will come to a bad end.
Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab has recently reissued two Herrmann discs, The Fantasy Film World of Bernard Herrmann (originally released on London, 1974) and The Four Faces of Jazz (London, 1973). The latter is a curio, with three European composers who turn a myopic eye toward the New World's barbaric innovation. Stravinsky's Ragtime is certainly raggedy, its disjointed syncopation and dissonant gloss being proudly avant-garde. On Darius Milhaud's The Creation of the World, the composer "enlivens" his impressionistic gauze with some gamely orchestrated blues that sound, as such things always do, a little dinky (meanwhile, the gauze sounds timeless). Kurt Weill is represented from his subversively depressed and witty score for The Threepenny Opera. The fourth face is Gershwin's, with an orchestra and a piano soloist showboating their way through a brace of tuxedo'd variations on "I Got Rhythm."
Where is Herrmann in all this? Famously temperamental, he's presumably waving a grumpy baton.
But if the Jazz disc is marginal, Fantasy Film is a good introduction to the composer's oeuvre. It offers four suites, devised and conducted by Herrmann, of his own music from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), and Fahrenheit 451 (1966). These films do not represent the composer's best work, just his most striking. His music was often otherworldly, and assignments like these tempted him to gild the lily -- which he never resisted.
Herrmann was often imitated, usually wretchedly, and just as his famous "black and white" (i.e., string section only) score for Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) became a touchstone for a generation of splatter maestros, so too The Day the Earth Stood Still now sounds like the motherlode of '50s sci-fi movie scores. His use of the theremin was especially cogent. Although Miklós Rózsa was the instrument's pioneer in film scoring -- for Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) -- Herrmann more fully explored its potential for creepy grandeur. Gaudy thrills abound, and yet he also interjects adult ambiances; the hugely goofy sounds that herald the entrance of the robot Gort soon modulate into a reflective episode reminiscent of the pinched-brass hopelessness of Citizen Kane's Xanadu.
Similarly, Sinbad at times comes on like the type of ersatz Oriental romp one would expect from Les Baxter, a minor film scorer and one of the heroes of the current lounge revival. But then Herrmann's temperament asserts itself and we're offered an airy yearning melody, one that would achieve a juicy apotheosis when reworked for Hitchcock's Marnie ('64). Journey is the composer's most wholly extroverted score here, grabbing you with its stereo equipment, testing five organs and the grotesquely bleating serpent, an anaconda-like wind instrument from the 17th century that Handel's Royal Fireworks Music made famous.
The score for François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 is the set's odd man out, being closer in kind to Herrmann's more straightforwardly romantic efforts. It begins with a section wherein the strings never touch the ground (anxiety has rarely been lovelier), moves to a more majestic version of the Psycho "driving" music, then settles in for some perhaps too-ripe sadness. If so, all is redeemed by the finale, a slowly unraveling lament and one of Herrmann's few flat-out beautiful melodies, even though it ends on an ominous note, a last-moment withholding of comfort that marks it more than anything as the composer's creation.
Herrmann's film music avoids all the usual pitfalls. It doesn't matter whether you've seen the films. His output doesn't have the anonymous, sludgy, pseudo-romantic sound of most pre-rock film scores. Although written to accompany, it has a life of its own. It is, in short, eminently worth hearing.